Books: The Substance of Life

The best of the living English novelists (E. M. Forster, Graham Greene,
Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green) write with intelligence, wit and moral
purpose. They are deeply concerned with the world and its fate. But
they can seldom dig into the insides of ordinary human experience,
reveling in its meat and marrow, the way the old boys did. By
comparison with the comic expansiveness of a Dickens or the moody
intensity of a Hardy, they seem merely to be giving life a quick,
light-fingered skim.